Seagate 7200.10 16mb

pcknight

pcknight

pcknight

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Are the Seagate 7200.10 16mb drives much faster in real terms than the ordinary 7200 8mb ones? Would i see a difference?
 
They use perpendicular recording, means the data density is higher on the 10 series, have double the cache and use the sata II standard, so yes the are faster, can you notice it ? Hard to tell. I'll be getting a 320Gb Seagate 10 soon, think i have a seies 7 or 8 somewhere so it will be interesting to see. :D
 
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Yea. Would like to get a faster Hard Drive. Is it better to get an 8m or a 16mb cache one?

Also, would i be better off getting SATA rather than IDE?
 
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The 16mb cache is preferable to the 8mb. SATA is likewise better than IDE/PATA, it has more bandwidth not that it is really ever fully used, like IDE.
Plus you have the benefit of smaller cables. :D
 
Firstly, note you get both 16MB cache and 8Mb 7200.10 drives, both SATA and IDE. So I'm not quite sure what you mean by "ordinary" 7200 8Mb drives. Are you referring to the 7200.9/8/7 drives?

Secondly, I doubt you'll see a large real-world difference between the 8 and 16MB drives in general. Obviously, 16Mb is better than 8Mb, but not to the extent that it seriously matters.

Thirdly, as for SATA vs. IDE: SATA is newer than IDE, and the maximum transfer rate per channel is higher on SATA than on IDE. But, no current drive can sustain near to even what the IDE interface supports so the difference is moot. (The only time you'll actually be able to potentially measure a difference, is when the drive bursts the data from the drive's cache, when it should approach the maximum speed of the host interface. As you can imagine, that won't matter much in the real world as it will only take a split second to unload the 16Mb cache at 133/150/300Mb/sec and the real world difference between the 3 would actually be probably imperceptible.)

At the end of the day, if you can use SATA, then there's no reason not to buy a sata drive IMO. The cables are easier to manage, and the interface is faster and newer, even if not really noticeably so in practice. But, for single drive applications, IDE will be almost as good. As for the 8 vs 16Mb, again, get the better one if you can. Why wouldn't you?
 
The other thing to bear in mind is that hard drives tend to have a longer useable life for home PC builders than motherboards, and IDE controllers are gradually disappearing. Many now have only 1 channel to cope with the Optical drives, so if you buy an IDE drive now it may not be useable with your next mobo.
 
Nice one Malcolm. What about drive size? I use XP with SP2 so the large hard drive would be recognised ok? I am thinking of getting a 250g hard drive.

Also, are larger hard drives slower than say 160g hard drives?
 
i got the 250g 16mb 7200.10 the other day and very pleased with how quiet and quick it is, was recognized straight away by xp sp2. as has been said with some mobos only coming with 1 ide channel then its worth buying sata.
 
it IS faster. about 20mb/sec faster on average. wether you can 'see' that in windows i couldny tell you, but it makes a difference on trasfering files, i can tell you that:)
 
is that all that really bothers you?

to answer your question - probably, given the same setup on that drive and say....a 7200.9. i bet my setup on a 250gb hitachi boots faster than some 7200.10 installs though, but thats about it. drive speed != windows boot speed.
 
pcknight said:
Did you find it very fast compared to older drives?
Click to expand...

I find my SATA 320Gb Seagate 7200.10 noticeably faster than my 4 year old 200Gb Maxtor.

Also just to mention, these new 7200.10 Seagate drives are some of the fastest 7200rpm drives around, because they pack data so densely on the platters (meaning more bits fly off the platter in one revolution than for most other hdd's.)

Larger hard drives may or may not be slower than smaller ones. It all depends how they're constructed. In the case of the 7200.10 series, the drives all share very nearly the same areal density so they're very similar performance wise, however if you're pedantic, the largest disk ends up being the fastest (in terms of max sustained transfer rate) by a small margin.
 
Bought the 250GB version just for general storage and its allot faster then I expected it to be considering the price... Does run a bit warm, its around 5C hotter then my 10,000rpm raptors..
 
Looking at the 250gb one myself. Want to make sure it will be fast and efficient before i buy. I have a Seagate 80g 7200rpm hard drive at the mo so the newer one should be noticeably faster?
 
My new set of hard drives arrive on Tuesday so I will let you know what I think.

I have gone with 4 x Seagate 250Gb Baraccuda 7200 with 8Mb Cache, 16Mb Cache model was only £3 more but out of stock until the end of September where I bought them from :( otherwise i would have got the 16Mb version.

They are going in towards a RAID0 and RAID1 setup so I won't really be able to comment on there performance as a single drive. Seagate give you a nice 5 year warranty though which is well worth the investment and from experience they rarely fail.

If you are using IDE ATM then one of the new Seagate SATA 10 series will be a lot faster ;)
 
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i have been using a 250gig seagate 7200.8 drive now for a year and its very nice, its a 8meg sata drive.

i have ordered a 250gig seagate 7200.10 16mb drive now to replace the 160gig maxtor that i have which has developed some bad sectors on it.

the new seagate is a sata2 drive where my old one is sata1. doubt it will make any difference in speed but from what i have seen as of late the seagate drives seem to be the most reliable, and i would sacrifice speed anyday to gain reliability.

i will run some tests on this drive when it arrives on thursday and see how it compares.

doubt i will be dissapointed since it cost me £45 inc vat and delivery from another etailer. :D
 
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